


to retrace your steps, to climb back to the upper air (there the struggle, there the labor lies)

by passeridae



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Body Horror, Chronic Pain, Families of Choice, Gen, Nanite Headcanons, Talon Family, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-09
Updated: 2019-08-09
Packaged: 2020-08-13 09:29:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20171989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/passeridae/pseuds/passeridae
Summary: Of course, just as he’s wallowing is the time Sombra decides to barge in.She’s chewing something, and the sound is overloud against his ears, grating and wet. The pop of dislocating joints as a bubble of gum bursts against her teeth. She sniffs, leans against the door frame. After a moment of no sound but Reaper’s jagged breaths she says, “Smells like pork in here, either you’re cooking something delicious or you worked too hard again.”





	to retrace your steps, to climb back to the upper air (there the struggle, there the labor lies)

It’s a bad pain day. 

It feels like burning from the inside out, fire prickling down his body in sharp waves over and over and over until he feels like one, raw, pulsing nerve. His good days are already laughable, undercut as they are with a dull throb that settles into his tendons and yanks at his bones like an ornery mutt pulling at a lead. Pain that leaves him tired and frustrated, confined within the ache and the exhausted fuzz it throws over his thoughts. He tries not to think of _before_, back when he was still sharp, ten moves ahead of everybody else and counting. 

Perhaps that’s the only good thing about bad days — he can’t torture himself by thinking of the past. His present is torture aplenty. 

Everything burns, heat and cold alike arcing along his limbs like electric shocks. Touching his sheets is agony, even the softest brushes of fabric ignite the pain into something almost unbearable. A sharp thing, almost alive in its ferocity, knives through his muscles, scraping bone, the tremors of high voltage currents crackling through him from head to toe. Sapping the strength from his limbs, rendering him _useless_, just a pile of meat and metal. If he had the strength, he would curl into a ball, but that is one more thing his traitorous body had taken from him. If he had the air to spare, he’d groan or curse, but as it is he’s barely able to get enough oxygen to power what muscle he has left. 

Of course, just as he’s wallowing is the time Sombra decides to barge in.

She’s chewing something, and the sound is overloud against his ears, grating and wet. The pop of dislocating joints as a bubble of gum bursts against her teeth. She sniffs, leans against the door frame. After a moment of no sound but Reaper’s jagged breaths she says, “Smells like pork in here, either you’re cooking something delicious or you worked too hard again.”

Reaper manages a frustrated hiss, short and soft. There’s nothing cooking, of course. No, it's always the same pattern — he’d done too much, overused his powers somehow, asked too much of the nanites residing in his flesh. Their symbiosis is a precarious one. As soon as he pushes too hard, even a little, the entire thing crumbles around him and he winds up here; flinching in agony, unable to do anything or take anything to numb the pain until the nanites have finished extracting their pound of flesh. Hours, if he’s lucky, if not then days. Nothing but pain lancing through him, keeping him awake and trembling and on the edge of sanity.

Sombra sidles across the room and tentatively lowers herself to sit on the edge of Reaper’s bed. Her face is twisted in concern, not a hint of a smirk to be seen. “You look like death. Well, more than usual that is.” If she’s not joking around, he must be looking particularly terrible. 

When he’s like this, it’s difficult for him to keep his form stable, stay looking humanoid. After the explosion, he’d suffered through hours and hours of experiments and tests just to be able to keep a human form at all — in the end they had to create a new skeleton to replace the old, built of titanium casings and an intricate ceramic mesh. Somewhere to house the nanites when they weren’t in use. Around this, within this, Reaper had to build himself anew. From the ground up, muscle by muscle and organ by organ. When he’s exhausted, though, things show through. Now, that osseous housing shows through degraded muscle and sinew, gleaming dull in the low light. Skin peeled back from his face, his torso, secondary muscle groups disintegrated as the energy is sucked up by the nanites to replace what he’d used. Monstrous. And the more he uses, the worse it gets. 

Sombra sighs, then wrinkles her nose as she breathes in the air around Gabe, “You smell almost like the last computer I fried, you didn’t manage to get the undersuit off in time, did you?” She tches, but fondly, like Gabriel’s mother used to when he did something exasperating but still endearing. “I always tell you to swap over to one made of cotton, this synth stuff melts on to you, not off. One day you’re gonna listen to me.”

She sits in silence for a few moments more. Not staring at him with pity, there was no way he could stand that, would overwork himself further to get her out if he saw pity in her gaze. But there isn’t. Just vague annoyance and something fond. But she’s a chatterbox by nature and can only stay quiet for so long, “need me to get anything for after your body’s done eating itself?”

Reaper glares, as well as he can with half a face. He doesn’t have fucking lungs, Sombra, how can he answer that?

She winks, “Pozole it is then.” With that, she opens a screen, dimmer than usual, just soft enough that it doesn’t hurt his eyes, and starts tapping away.

Then, quiet enough that he almost doesn’t hear it, she mutters, “hope you’re okay.”


End file.
